


What's In a Name?

by Neyiea



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Season/Series 05 Finale, post-acid J is still valid and I will ship these two forever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 16:27:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18898369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neyiea/pseuds/Neyiea
Summary: Poison Ivy had a plan, a legendary Gotham contender puts a stop to it.Bruce has changed so much, and so has everyone else.(But not everything has been altered. Some things, it seems, remain eternal.)





	What's In a Name?

**Author's Note:**

> Just testing something out. That season finale still has me shaking, gossssh, good to see your obsession is still going strong, J.

Gotham has changed so much in the years that he’s been gone. There are streets he doesn’t recognize, buildings where his brain tells him there should be blank spaces, and clean expanses of brick where once narrow eyes and red ‘HAHAHA’s were painted as a smile to remind the masses of a dead messiah. The criminals have changed too, evolving into something more than they had been before. 

Oswald Cobblepot, Edward Nygma, Jonathan Crane…

And, most distressingly at the current moment, Ivy Pepper.

“When I heard that you’d come back I simply had to drop in and say hello,” she says as she looms over him, her mouth curving in a smile but her eyes blank of anything but loathing. “We have so much unfinished business, you and I.”

He’s had so much attention since coming back to Gotham that the flower arrangements in his office hadn’t sounded any mental alarms. This wouldn’t be the first, or the last, time that various Gotham matrons tried to win him over into agreeing to dinner invitations so as to meet their eligible daughters.

The flowers, curled into simple buds this morning, had unfurled fully once the light of the sun hit directly onto their petals. In a matter of seconds the air was thick with a syrupy perfume, and before Bruce could think to cover his nose and mouth he’d found his body going lax.

And then a familiar redhead strode into his office, looking for all the world like she belonged there. 

“Ivy,” he rasps. Her falsified smile morphs into a frown. 

“No talking.” She reaches out a hand to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear, and even though Bruce inhales through his mouth instead of his nose he can feel everything becoming hazier. His vision takes on a dream-like quality and Ivy becomes soft around the edges, like something that needs to be protected instead of something covered in enough thorns to protect itself. “Men like you should be seen, not heard.” 

Bruce may be stronger than when he’d left, but everyone else has become stronger too. Something in the back of his mind is keeping vigilant, committing the situation to memory so that he’ll never succumb to this tactic again, but Ivy’s pull proves as inescapable as the last time she’d used Bruce as a tool to bring about her own ideas regarding what the Earth needed. 

He nods.

Her smile returns.

He’s happy to be the one making her smile. 

She guides him out of his office, out of his building, his new playboy persona evidentially working against him since no one casts more than one questioning look in his direction as he leaves in the middle of the work day accompanied by a beautiful woman. He feels as if he’s moving through water, resistance in each step he takes, and much later he will find himself wondering if it was because of whatever was in his system, or because he was managing to withstand complete submission. 

Ivy Pepper, now Poison Ivy, is an ecoterrorist whose motivations never seem to stray far from what they had been years ago. Kill the people, save the plants. Destroy the ones destroying the Earth so that the world could return to its natural, beautiful state. Find the heads of projects and corporations who were responsible for terrible sins committed against nature and act as Mother Nature herself, defending her children and fertilizing them with the bodies left behind.

“Your clean energy initiative is too little, too late,” Ivy tells him. “Do you know what a terrible impact you’ve had using your money to rebuild sections of Gotham that were almost one with the Earth again, not to mention constructing that ridiculous tower?”

“I’m sorry Ivy,” he offers genuinely. The words feel thick in his mouth.

“You will be.”

She leads Bruce inside of a building, and everything goes green. It’s a deep, soothing colour, not the shining toxic green of a night almost eleven years ago, but it still makes the breath catch in his throat.

Ivy has started monologuing, a trait that more than a few people have seemed to pick up—Bruce supposes he should be thankful that his adversaries always have so much to say—but he can’t quite focus on her words even though his mind compels him to listen to that soft, lovely voice that’s telling him wretched, lovely things.

His gaze is drawn to a group of giant pitcher plants instead, the purple colouring of their veins against the green of the leaves is striking for more than one reason. 

The cloying smell of the flowers that she’d first used to impair him is long gone and only the power of her perfume, or pheromones, or whatever she was calling it these days, remains. The tug of it is so strong, but maybe if it got out of his system too…

“And that’s why,” she brings a hand up to the back of his head and draws his face down into the crook of her neck. “You are going to escort me to a party this evening.”

Bruce holds his breath.

She notices, and her nails dig into his skull.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Bruce.” Her voice is soft even as she keeps him pinned in place, still too far under her sway to break the hold. “You’re not going to like the hard way.”

He breathes in.

It’s like he’s seeing the world through a gaussian blur filter. 

The greens and purples that had made him uneasy before are nothing, not in the presence of Ivy.

“Of course, anything you want.”

She pats his cheek. He sighs and leans into her hand.

“That’s the idea.” She pulls away and reaches into her coat pocket for a glass perfume bottle, spritzing herself a few times. “Now how about you be a dear and start loading my special flowers for tonight into the van? And, since one can never be too careful…” She turns the bottle and sprays him directly in the face.

The blur becomes even more unfocussed.

His mind feels cloudy.

He’s gone.

A piercing sound starts pulling him out of the dense fog that obscures him.

He closes his eyes and breathes deeply through his mouth, praying that he isn’t just inhaling something that will put him so far back under that he’s left completely unaware of his actions and surroundings.

There’s screaming, and lights are flickering from beyond his closed eyelids, and—

The sound of a gunshot was what started bringing him back to himself. That fact makes the blood in his veins turn to ice. 

He opens his eyes, still feeling dreadfully hazy, and he sees Ivy screaming at a patch of shadows. The flowers that she’d had him dutifully lay out have all been set ablaze, as if they’re brambles that can only be dealt with by burning them away. Perhaps they are.

There’s another gunshot, and Bruce’s eyes flicker around to find no one else here. It’s him, and Ivy, and a room slowly filling with smoke, and—

Ivy retreats without once looking back. It’s only him, now.

He inhales through his nose, the smell of smoke is getting thick enough that he can taste it in the back of his throat, and he's weak with the desire to go after Ivy. She still needed him, didn’t she? He starts making to follow her through the growing flames.

An arm wraps around his chest and pulls him back.

“Now now,” a voice whispers in his ear, “I know she’s got you under her spell, but you really don’t want to be doing that, Bruce.”

Shining green. Deep purple. A giggle bursting past red lips.

“Jeremi—"

“That’s not my name,” he cuts in, informative and to-the-point. “I stopped being that person years ago, and you would know all about that, wouldn’t you?” There’s a rough chuckle, and Bruce can feel the chin of not-Jeremiah settle on his shoulder. “You stopped being Bruce Wayne so that you could become something more, too.”

Bruce squirms in not-Jeremiah’s hold, he’s just held tighter in response.

“ _Batsy_ ,” he drawls with his usual air of dramatism. Bruce goes still. “My absolute favorite nocturnal creature. We are going to have so much fun together now that we’re both as we’re meant to be. I can’t wait to have a proper opportunity to tango with you, my dear. If I had known that you’d be able to follow me and little Barbara Lee to the place where it all began, well,” his tone becomes laced with warm familiarity, “my plans would have been so much grander. Our reunion deserved more fanfare than that.” 

His giggle sounds ten times as unhinged as it had back when he was planning to have Bruce re-live the day of his parents’ death.

The uneasy feeling settling inside of Bruce wars with the serenity left over by Ivy’s influence. 

Distantly he can hear the sound of sirens drawing closer, and not-Jeremiah’s giggling peters out. 

“I’ll be seeing you Batsy,” he promises. There’s a sensation against Bruce’s neck, as if a kiss is being pressed there. “Tell those dullards that I’m going by a new name now, won’t you?” His arm disentangles from around Bruce, and he slips something into Bruce’s pocket. “I’d hate for all that I do to be attributed to the lesser self that I left behind.”

Bruce stands still, not sure if he’s ready to turn around and stand face to face with the madman behind him. Before his eyes the fire is spreading, and the sound of sirens is so close that they must be right outside.

“Tell me your name.”

“You’ll know it when you see it,” is the cryptic response. 

There’s a crack, and pain in the back of his head, and Bruce crumples to the ground.

When he wakes up, after the paramedics have looked him over and deemed him stable, he slips a hand into his pocket and pulls out a playing card.

“Joker,” he whispers to himself. A wild card. Bruce stares at the wide smile, and the garish colours, and the imprint of lipstick left behind on the surface.

It suits him.


End file.
